Nonetheless, Rilke hated Paris. He felt invisible and alone, surrounded by men and women driven like machines, people ‘holding out under the foot of each day that trod on them, like tough beetles’. Their ‘burdened lives’, he told a friend, threatened to swamp him: I often had to say aloud to myself that I was not one of them … And yet, when I noticed how my clothes were becoming worse and heavier from week to week … I was frightened and felt that I would belong irretrievably to the lost if some passer-by merely looked at me and half unconsciously counted me with them.
